Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Left to myself when it comes to watching TV of an evening lately, I’ve rather amused myself by watching shows and series which bored my daughter, and unsettled Wee Jamie … the series Cadfael, for instance – appeared to give Jamie bad dreams for some unfathomable reason, so we switched to comic fare like Malcolm in the Middle and Home Improvement. Having watched the whole run of Downton Abbey, my next choice fell to the recent British produced miniseries of War & Peace. Yes, the series based on the interminable epic novel (epic meaning omigawd it’s long! Even longer than Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, or Prousts’ In Search of Lost Time).

The-then Soviets made an epic movie of the novel in the 1960s – and it was also an epic production, as national cultural pride was at stake! The resulting production took years of shooting, thousands of extras, and a fortune in costs; apparently entire museums were emptied of authentic bits and bobs in order to duplicate that period in Russian history. The movie eventually made it to American television – the Wikipedia article says that it aired in four parts in the late summer of 1972. A vision of historical splendor, even in black and white on a small screen. I thought it had aired a few months earlier, as I distinctly recall that I was still in high school when I watched it on TV, and I would have graduated by that time. Anyway – much enjoyed the Russian movie version, especially as every one of the cast were total unknowns to me, and so they were entirely subsumed into the characters that they played.

In fact, I enjoyed the movie so much that I willingly sat down and read the whole book, of my own free will – a not inconsiderable reading project for anyone. I confessed to skimming over the long philosophical discussions between characters; the family and societal dynamics, the sweep of historical events were all quite riveting enough. Although – when I watched some excerpts from the Russian movie version recently, I realized that the two male leads playing Pierre and Prince Andre were way too old for the roles they played. I see now that the actors in the more recent British series are much more age-appropriate. Pierre is supposed to be an earnest, slightly gullible nerd, and his best pal Prince Andre is the handsome yet troubled romantic. And Lily Allen was apparently the go-to ingenue actress when it came to doing flighty and silly young things. Anyway, aside from thinking some of the female costumes are a bit over the edge … really, a single-shoulder and sleeveless afternoon gown? Taking the ancient Greek fashion a bit too far? Well, the character wearing it is supposed to be …. Questionable in virtue and practically everything else so … looking forward to the rest of the series.

Such was the deeply sarcastic query from Casey Stengel, the frustrated manager of the spectacularly inept early 60’s NY Mets. Well, at least that Mets lineup were only flaming out at baseball, but after reading a certain historical novel on Kindle last week, I’m honestly wondering if a trio of supposedly able and best-selling scribblers blessed by an establishment publishing house and significant placement on the NY Times best-sellers list can play that game, too.

I’d never heard of any of the trio of writers who got together to scribble this novel about a trio of nurses in the Philippine Islands during WWII; I’m honestly not into what passes for modern women’s novels that are popular with Oprah, or wine-mom’s book clubs. I’m also not really into romance novels, either, having outgrown that genre at least 4 decades ago, if not longer. But when this novel came up on Amazon suggested for my next read, it at least looked interesting. The sample offered looked at least OK … and I’ve been diverted by reading a lot of light, amusing historical mysteries lately – mainly Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness series, which has the benefit of amusing and well-developed characters, nicely-played mysteries, and an excellent sense of the period – 1930s England, mostly, with some side excursions to France, Italy, Kenya and the United States. No wildly impossible historical clangers dropped, with a sound like a manhole cover hitting the pavement at speed. Just an interesting reading diversion when spending 40 minutes pedaling the electric bike at the gym, or for winding down at night. The setting for When We Had Wings was one which I already knew something about; I had done the research for my own WWII novel, and had at least four non-fiction books on my own shelves about the experiences of American military nurses in that place and time.

A novel about three women – an Army nurse, a Navy nurse, and a Filipino civilian contract nurse, who are best friends in Manila in 1941 and have dramatic wartime experiences under the Japanese occupation thereafter looked to me as if it would be an interesting read, but holy moly, did I want my money back when I was done! I should have bailed out at the first historical clanger, dropped at about a quarter of the way in. Yes, a young, enlisted man in the early weeks of 1942 talked about how he planned to go to college on the GI Bill … a program that wasn’t even created until two years later. I carried on, glummer by the page, just to see how many other historical improbabilities there would be; the very worst was close to the end; one of the freed nurses watched Dick Tracy on television … in 1945, about two years before TV sets were widely available to the public (the war stymied manufacture of them), and five before Dick Tracy was even broadcast as a TV series. There were some other, small historical improbabilities, and omissions which would have added something to the story (in my opinion), the characterization of the three heroines was on the level of cardboard cutouts. I could barely tell the three of them apart, their backgrounds were underdeveloped, why they were even best pals to start with wasn’t developed … it was all a case of “tell” and hardly anything of “show.”

It’s the historical clangers that bugged me, most of all; they are all very obvious things that would have been easy enough to check, at least by an editor – and yet, apparently no one did, or even thought – Hey, maybe we ought to check this element, make certain that this was something that someone would have been talking about in that year. It is indeed a pitfall for writers who venture into historical fiction. This came up in a long-ago discussion in another group of writers who specialized in that genre; you almost had to reprogram yourself of the assumption that long-ago people lived just like us moderns, only with curious clothes and no electricity. Attitudes, customs, everything from food items and recipes to religious practices were different, sometimes wildly different. Knowledgeable readers would be cruel to writers who didn’t at least try to immerse themselves thoroughly in another time and place.

Now and again in the independent author groups where I hang out some of the contributors with scars from their time laboring in the dark galleys of the big-name establishment publishers recollect how careless and amateur the big-name publishers have become, to the point where the sane and intensely creative people fled to the saner world of indy writing and publishing.  I suppose what galls me the most about the careless flubs in When We Had Wings was that it was a simple matter for an author, editor or proof-reader to have checked the dates of the GI Bill and broadcast television programs, just to make the period setting believable. When I helped out another local author with her memoir of growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I went to the trouble of double-checking what TV programs her parents would have been watching on a weeknight at 10 PM when she came waltzing in way past her curfew and thereby kicked off a scene with them. That no one bothered with such in Wings is a sad refection on the big publishing machine. I won’t soon pay as much for an ebook put out by one of them, that’s for certain. Just not worth the candle.